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Life Quotes

“Life” is a smaller page than you might expect, and an older one. Seneca is the most-quoted of the classical writers, and the sourced entries run from Emerson’s journals in 1822 to Carl Jung’s memoir in 1963. Reading it is closer to browsing a shelf of moralists than scrolling a feed of captions.

One entry needs a warning. “Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced” is credited to Søren Kierkegaard all over the internet. The earliest appearance anyone has located is in a 1976 book about Jack Kerouac, which is a long way from nineteenth-century Copenhagen. We keep it listed, with its flag, because people search for it. We would not put his name under it.

Random quote on Life

Most quoted on life:

Shall he who soars, inspired by loftier views,
Life's little cares and little pains refuse?
Shall he not rather feel a double share
Of mortal woe, when doubly arm'd to bear?

George Crabbe

In the midway of this our mortal life,
I found me in a gloomy wood, astray,
Gone from the path direct.

Dante Alighieri

Sing it not in mournful numbers.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

That man lives happy and in command of himself, who from day to day can say I have lived. Whether clouds obscure, or the sun illumines the following day, that which is past is beyond recall.

Horace

In life's last scene what prodigies surprise,
Fears of the brave, and follies of the wise!
From Marlborough's eyes the streams of dotage flow,
And Swift expires a driveller and a show.

Samuel Johnson

Before old age I took care to live well; in old age I take care to die well; but to die well is to die willingly.

Seneca the Younger

Ah! somehow life is bigger after all
Than any painted angel could we see
The God that is within us!

Oscar Wilde

There are some ten thousand religious sects — each with its own cosmology, each with its own answer for the meaning of life and death. Most assert that the other 9,999 not only have it completely wrong but are instruments of evil, besides.

Jon Krakauer

Speak to all men as you do to yourself, with no concern for the effect you make, so that you do not shut them out from your world; lest in isolation the meaning of life slips out of sight and you lose the belief in the perfection of creation.

Leó Szilárd

O Life! how pleasant is thy morning,
Young Fancy's rays the hills adorning!
Cold-pausing Caution's lesson scorning,
We frisk away,
Like schoolboys at th' expected warning,
To joy and play.

Robert Burns

We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it.

Anaïs Nin Diary entries (1914)

Think, in this batter'd Caravanserai
Whose Portals are alternate Night and Day,
How Sultan after Sultan with his Pomp
Abode his destined Hour, and went his way.

Omar Khayyám FitzGerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859)

I love you and I forgive you. I am like you and you are like me. I love all people. I love the world. I love creating. Everything in our life should be based on love.

Ray Bradbury

For we are mistaken when we look forward to death; the major portion of death has already passed. Whatever years be behind us are in death's hands.

Seneca the Younger

However, while I crawl upon this planet I think myself obliged to do what good I can in my narrow domestic sphere, to all my fellow-creatures, and to wish them all the good I cannot do.

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield

Catch, then, oh! catch the transient hour,
Improve each moment as it flies;
Life's a short summer—man a flower;
He dies—alas! how soon he dies!

Samuel Johnson

Thus at the flaming forge of life
Our fortunes must be wrought;
Thus on its sounding anvil shaped
Each burning deed and thought!

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Half my life is full of sorrow,
Half of joy, still fresh and new;
One of these lives is a fancy,
But the other one is true.

Adelaide Anne Procter

EXISTENCE, n.
A transient, horrible, fantastic dream,
Wherein is nothing yet all things do seem:
From which we're wakened by a friendly nudge
Of our bedfellow Death, and cry: "O fudge!"

Ambrose Bierce The Cynic's Dictionary (1906)

Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow,
A poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more:
it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

William Shakespeare Macbeth (1605)

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